In manufacturing the electronic displays many process steps are required to create a functional display. For example display laminate provided by the display element manufacturers requires certain processing before it can be used as a functional display.
When the display laminate is converted into a functional display, an electrical contact from driving electronics and backplane to front electrode layer must be established. To achieve this, sections of display laminate need to be removed. In the prior art solutions this is done by manually cleaning a small region of the display film by soft cloth dipped into solvent. This is, of course, a time consuming and tedious job when displays are manufactured in high quantities.
One form of electronic displays are electronic paper displays which are used for example in electronic price tags and e-books. Electronic paper display can be based on electrophoretic display which consists of supporting film, front electrode layer and display material layer. The display material layer can be for example electrophoretic ink layer. In case of electronic labels based on electrophoretic display laminate, electrophorectic ink is removed from a certain area of the display material in order to create room for electrical contact to the front electrode. The front electrode is typically made of evaporated and very thin ITO (Indium-tin-oxide) so the applied removing method must be gentle enough not to damage the electrode.